Consumers and taxpayers,
the world's most exploited and forgotten classes, have no lobbying
force at this week's circus-like meeting of the World Trade
Organization in Seattle. They are not among the assembled government
officials, nor among the grasping non-government organizations, nor
among those protesting this magnet for would-be global planners.

And yet it is the world's consumers and taxpayers who
pay the biggest price for the managed-trade and protectionist politics
cooked up at the WTO. The costs far surpass the millions spent on the
WTO's lavish suites, limos, feasts, champagne and meetings; they also
include the brow-beating, regulations, tariffs, quotas, anti-dumping
policies, export subsidies, litigation, and all the other interventions
that hamper free trade in the name of protecting it.

To understand the WTO requires this counter-intuitive
insight: it favors free trade in name only. Strip away the rhetoric,
and the WTO is like all bureaucracies, mainly concerned with expanding
its own power and jurisdiction. Like all governments, it is
relentlessly imperialistic. And like all international agencies, it
lives extravagantly and unaccountably at everyone else's expense.

On one hand are the assembled governments. They are
bickering for control of the WTO's formidable powers to negotiate trade
disputes and impose sanctions. The big three -- Europe, Asia, the U.S.
-- battle over the appointment of judges who can rig the rules to favor
their own manufacturers against overseas competitors. The only good
sense comes from the developing countries, who resent the attempt to
impose labor regulations that would take away their comparative
advantage.

On the other hand, we have the demonstrators with their
placards and their chants. Beloved by the media, they are a motley
collection of wooly-headed environmentalists, '60s leftovers who oppose
all economic development, thuggish labor union officials, whining
advocates for the rights of "children" and "women," and economically
ignorant opponents of international trade itself.

They are only posturing as protestors, however, since
they are demanding that the WTO do what the Clinton administration
would have it do if it faced no resistance: enforce a left-liberal
vision of the world by executive fiat at consumer and taxpayer expense.
The WTO incorporates legal mechanisms for regulating the world economy
exactly in this way. Even the WTO's original charter included a
tip-of-the-hat to these special-interest concerns.

The demonstrators are correct that the mucky-mucks doing
the negotiating are not looking after the interests of the little guy;
it is the large corporations and the powerful pressure groups that
pique their interest. The negotiating trade ministers are correct that
the protestors are imbeciles who would destroy the world economy if
they had their way. Hence, they reach a compromise, with each side
giving a bit to the other side, as the world economy grows ever more
ridden with every form of hidden protectionism.

The entire affair makes you long for the days of GATT,
which only four years ago served as an inconspicuous legal apparatus
for trade negotiations. It wasn't perfect, and wasn't even necessary,
but it was a heck of a lot better than the politicized and
bureaucratized approach of the WTO.

In previous centuries, trade among nations worked
without the intervention of a legally-christened arbiter. Governments
sometimes imposed heavy restrictions on imports and exports, but
disputes were generally handled by the parties to the exchange
themselves. Merchant law regulated contracts, while trust, reputation,
and consumer sovereignty were the guiding forces that kept everyone
honest.

It was the great insight of the British classical
liberals that trade did not need to be managed either domestically or
internationally. Consumers and producers, regardless of the country
they lived in, were perfectly capable of negotiating their own deals,
whereas tariffs and other trade barriers only ended up harming everyone
in the long run. Accordingly, the classical liberals sought to
eliminate all restrictions on trade, and opposed every manner of
government management.

True free traders have always favored this system as an
ideal. Only the pure laissez-faire approach works to the betterment of
all. Global free markets means that a poor man in Bangladesh can
support his family, that a farmer in Idaho can have the tractor he
wants, that an industrialist in Toronto can get the parts he needs,
that American consumers can fulfill their desires for themselves and
their children, that the whole world can be civilized.

But governments don't like this system because it leaves
them out of the picture. Since early in this century, they have tried
to establish an international structure to manage it. In order to
protect free trade from rapacious planners, free traders stopped
Woodrow Wilson's plan to establish an International Trade Tribunal
after World War I. And they defeated Harry Truman's scheme to impose an
International Trade Organization as the third leg of the
Keynesian-inspired Bretton Woods system, along with the World Bank and
the International Monetary Fund.

The ITT and the ITO were reincarnated by the Clinton
administration as the WTO in 1995 as part of the Uruguay Round of GATT
trade talks. It faced an uphill battle in the Senate, and it goes
without saying that most Americans either had no opinion on the matter,
or opposed it as they oppose anything that smacks of the New World
Order. The WTO was ratified because the payoffs to the Senate were high
enough, and, even more crucially, Washington's free traders lacked the
intellectual stamina to see this pact as the threat it was and is.

World trade is sometimes said to be freer than ever, but
this is not true. The world economy is larger and more integrated than
ever, and to this reality we owe a great deal of our present
prosperity. At the same time, world trade has never been more
politicized. Never before have union bosses, greens, and loopy social
reformers been able, so successfully, to use international trade for
political agitation. Never before have protectionist governments -- the
U.S. a main player among them -- had such access to litigation and
intervention. Never before has a developing capitalist economy like
China been forced to crawl before a cartel of governments just to gain
admittance to the world trading system.

Because it was destined to become a battleground for
pressure groups, the WTO should have been stopped in 1995 when there
was a chance to kill it. Now its abolition will be an uphill climb. But
the fight is still essential. And when and if we win it, we will know
that the interests of consumers have prevailed.

Originally published as "Kill the WTO" at
WorldNetDaily.com, November 30, 1999

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